Half-Pint Heroes

Many many years back, I collected action figures. I had hundreds of them, some still in the packages and some loose. Not even the vast majority of them were on display, but they still occupied an overwhelming amount of space in my home – I had two full bookshelves, several partial bookshelves, dozens hanging on the wall. It was a mess. I’m sure a lot of you have been in similar straits.

For a lot of reasons – the space, the clutter, the ethical issues of compulsive plastic purchasing and assembly-line worker conditions overseas, the fact that I had dozens of these things in boxes in a closet or a storage unit and never even got to look at them, and so on - I cleared out my collection. My life is a lot better in a lot of respects for having gotten rid of my collections – it’s less cluttered, for one thing – but I still sometimes miss those colorful little creations all lined up on my shelf.

To satisfy the collecting bug, I started putting together templates in Illustrator for what I call Half-Pint Heroes – I’d been drawing big-head versions of my favorite characters for years, but creating them in vector form lets me re-use body parts and change paint jobs while retaining the uniform scale (just like action figures!), and yet still come up with a virtual ‘shelf-full’.

I’ve been tweaking and refining the template for a year or so, and finally have it at a point where I was happy with it. The Vision below was the first completed figure from the inaugural ‘set’:

He makes up the first figure in my “Marvel Costumes From The 1970s I Thought Were Awesome” set. See, that’s another benefit of having a completely digital ‘toy’ collection, I get to create me own releases!

Here are the remaining four from this first set: Captain Britain, Daredevil, Iron Man and the Scarlet Witch. You can see all of the figures in this gallery series …

So who’s next? Well, I have some Superman villains to clean up so they fit the template (and a few to add to the collection), but beyond that you’ll have to wait and see!